In springtime the dragon is useless

vulnerability

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So it’s day four without wearing glasses, and overall I’m really enjoying it.

But I still feel like I’m only just beginning to grasp how significant my visual impairment has been.

Yesterday a friend asked me how I would approach health issues from a psychological/spiritual perspective. Using eyesight as an example, I told her I would begin by examining the emotional impact and significance of the condition itself and its symptoms.

For instance, having poor eyesight makes me feel fearful and vulnerable in my interactions with the outside world, because I become aware of things – seeing them in their blurred form – long before I can recognise them, or in the case of humans, discern their intent from facial cues.

Poor eyesight also enhances my sense that there is a world “out there” which I imperfectly perceive. This leads to a near-constant sense of doubt about my perceptions and my judgements.

I feel as though other people are quicker or more astute than me, because they see things and recognise them before I do.

Overall I’m left with the sense that I am better able to deal with things in close proximity to myself. That means I have a tendency toward introversion and introspection, as well as activities like reading and writing.

Inversion

So that’s a brief summary of the apparent psychological side-effects of this illness or impairment. The trick now would be to invert cause and effect, to consider the magnitude and depth of these psychological phenomena as potential causes of the physical condition.

The heuristic approach is that our physical impairments are by and large a reflection of suppressed or ignored psychological conflicts and suffering.

Let’s say you feel afraid, but for various social and cultural reasons you can’t express that fear. Being unable to express it, the fear cannot be resolved.

Eventually a physical problem emerges that demands your attention, demands a resolution. In the case of myopia, short-sightedness emulates and reflects the suppressed emotional conflict or suffering.

We try to address the physical impairment with medical interventions including corrective lenses. But in the case of corrective lenses the intervention is merely a crutch.

The lenses don’t overcome the underlying fear, they actually help suppress it further. The glasses become a necessary object, they become imbued with protective power. You can’t get by without them, and when they break or you lose them…you feel afraid and vulnerable once more.

Healing

Looking at an illness or impairment in this light is instructive. But we also need to consider the age of onset, the severity of the condition, how long it has been endured, and so on. All of this information offers potential clues to identifying the psychological cause.

I assume this approach doesn’t hold the answer to every single illness and impairment. And it doesn’t necessarily mean that every such impairment or illness will be reversed. But at the very least, it can help us to identify and resolve the psychological and emotional conflict that lies behind it.

If I had laser eye surgery tomorrow, my vision might be perfect. But that would still leave me having to adjust to a new experience, a new way of being in the world. It would be a little like becoming a new self, and if you think the psychological landscape behind it would just quietly reform, I think you’d be disappointed.

As for me, I’ll have to examine the nature and origin of the fear and vulnerability that accompanies this impairment in my vision.

To that end, the impairment itself can always provide further clues, not only in terms of how we feel about it, but the significance of its effects. It is significant, for example, that myopia would prevent me from seeing certain things. For all that short-sightedness impairs our vision, it also protects us by creating distance from the external world.